A narrative of the Negro

by Leila Amos Pendleton

"Who will have the power and the right to narrate the history of the black race?" So ask Joanne Braxton and Sharon Zuber in their introduction to this volume, a question asked in the early twentieth century by such educators and reformers as Leila Amos Pendleton and Laura Eliza Wilkes, women intent on achieving racial uplift through the revelation of the contributions of black men and women throughout history. Pendleton's A Narrative of the Negro (1912) was intended for young readers and links the themes of literacy and the struggle for freedom in profiles of such figures as Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Wilkes's volume, Missing Pages in American History (1919), subtitled Revealing the Services of Negroes in the Early Wars in the United States of America, 1641-1815, focuses on the wartime service of African Americans in the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Federal periods. Together, these two works serve as a valuable example of hist